


Final

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Headcanon, Hopeful but also not, Inspired by Music, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter), Winter, jily, some headcanon involved but just about 90 percent parallel, sorry folks it's Not Happy, stress writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Prophecies are confusing and haunting things, and Lily Evans Potter has a lot of rioting thoughts to think about them.





	Final

****_ “...There's just a moment too soon _ __   
_ Or a second too late, _ __   
_ The phantom of warmth, _ _   
_ __ An outline of sorts;

_ Those souls that I've loved _ __   
_ Those perfect ones _ _   
_ __ Oh, sing to me of loss;

__ I wouldn't dare try.  
_ See, I know not of life and even less of loss,  
_ __ So I wouldn't dare try…”

—Wilsen, “Final,” from  _ I Go Missing In My Sleep _

—

“Bloody cold, man alive.” James hisses into the frigid air and Lily’s teeth chatter. Nobody uses magic outside of safety wards, which means they aren’t warming and they aren’t Apparating. Even taking the Floo from the meeting house to the rendezvous pub is getting dodgy. “Come along then, I’ll put the kettle on at home.”

And so it’s cold, and they’re tromping through snow because they must.

Lily follows behind James in the carvings of his footprints with flakes still winnowing down from the sky, albeit less heavily now than they were earlier, and blinks some away from her lashes to blur the amber promise of Godric’s Hollow in the distance ahead of them. It’s so tiny there, so far in a way she hasn’t been used to looking at anything considered home in a long time now, because before they could simply wish themselves almost anywhere they wanted. Before they could weave tingly charms into the gaps in their coats, and Lily is absently running her mitten-covered hand over her stomach while her breath clouds into the air and Cassiopeia looks down at her and James in chilly, distant splendor.

She remembers sitting up in the astronomy tower with Sirius in year six, smoking cigarettes and laughing and trading secrets like playing cards —secrets that ended up coming out in the shapes of James; Remus; Lily’s fear of failure; Sirius’ fear of greatness.  _ Look there, _ he’d said in the middle of a comfortable silence as he pointed up at what looked at first like only a patch of sky,  _ that’s Cassiopeia. I’ve some moldering cousin named after her but I’m sure this one is a lot prettier. _

It had been simpler back then, blowing smoke into the sky as though the years weren’t crumpling beneath them.

“Lily?”

James calls out to her softly from a few meters ahead and she looks up when she realizes she’s stopped walking. It doesn’t do to stop walking, not this far from protection, and sure they’ve their wands on them, but things are different now. Even St. Mungo’s had smelled a bit more like loss when Lily had been in just the other day, the Healer beaming at her warmly as Lily had done her best to mimic such simple brightness back at that pleasantly wrinkled face—God, she might not even have the chance to worry about wrinkles. Lily isn’t stupid. She can read the room at every Order meeting, and they’ve been getting bleaker and bleaker since June.

Now it’s January, and that bleakness is starting to ice over. Trelawny’s presence tonight had included a prophecy that had turned Lily’s blood cold for it’s coincident timing.

But, as she’s known for a long time now, there’s no such thing as coincidence.

“Sorry, coming.”

James waits for her to catch up before he resumes walking as well, all knees alongside her and slowing his loping pace to meet her shorter stride. The silence is pins in her lungs, but Lily much prefers it to pausing for any longer in the wide open. Marlene was killed just a month ago, and if Lily concentrates deeply enough she can almost put the thought out of her head.

“Hey.” James’ hand slides to hold her own, and Lily bites down on her back teeth to stay a strange press of emotion. “Alright, love?”

She’s readied the  _ I’m fine, _ those two words that have started more arguments between them in the past few weeks than the last eight years put together, it’s right behind her teeth, but it breaks on a bitter jag of an exhale that leaves her tongue feeling scalded in the cold. “No.”

James stops again, glancing briefly at the smear of home still several minutes’ walk away from this spot in the field— _ It’s open, too open, we need to keep moving _ —James slides his hands to Lily’s shoulder, and that crease between his eyebrows where his glasses meet his nose is so earnest that Lily almost shouts into the sky. “What’s wrong?”

She’s more than prepared to spin up an excuse from her depths, the younger sister’s eternal expertise of lying confidently in the face of difficulty, but the pointed honesty in her husband’s eyes is fucking maddening. Lily can’t keep lying anymore. There’s too much at stake now.

“There’s isn’t any rhyme or reason,” she says, stilted and awkward as her knobby-kneed patronus, and yet she keeps talking; “Nothing, none of it, to any of this. People are just—our friends, James, they’re disappearing or—or falling apart, and how the fuck do we help them?”

James blinks rapidly, his jaw flexing along with his fingers against Lily’s coat. “It’s alright, Lily.”

Lily tosses her head then, more snowflakes sticking to her collar and her top lip but she can’t staunch this flow now. She hugs herself around her middle and holds James’ stare as though he’s holding her afloat—truly, he is, he’s the only things that’s mattered for years now. “What did we all do to deserve this? This can’t all be random, James, it can’t have been just  _ one person _ causing this, I—we’re in hiding in our own home! What do we need to do, repent?!”

She gasps for pause on a scrape of breath when James hushes her softly, a frightened gesture for peace in such bare surroundings that they could be seen from any side.  _ We could die out here, _ she thinks wildly. That fucking prophecy echoes in the back of her mind again, Trelawney’s warbling voice;  _ Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies.  _ Lily tightens her hold around herself as though it can keep the present together, keep her and James and everyone they love together—Sirius has slept on their couch every full moon since last spring, and Remus looks as though he’s aging for the both of them; Dorcas hasn’t looked anyone in the eye since December, and it so fucking awful that Lily might break in half and ruin it for the lot of them.

“It’s—Lily, it’s alright, come here.” James pulls her against him in a tight hug and she keeps her own arms around herself but shuts her eyes and allows herself a second of suspended gentleness. She inhales James’ woolen coat and the traces of his cologne and the metallic tinge of his dormant magic, and she loves him to her bones and back. His voice is muffled and thrumming and almost a lullaby when he murmurs to her with raspy worry; “It’s all just chance. We can’t predict any of this, all we can do is live.”

Lily spins James’ words around in her head, his surety so comforting every other time she’s needed them and yet missing their mark now. Lily knows something horrid and beautiful and utterly, perfectly harrowing, and she can hardly breathe to hold it in.

And so she doesn’t.

“I’m pregnant.”

James tenses around her and in that breath Lily knows he’s felt it too—the shift of everything around him from Distant to Suddenly All Too Close. His fingers press into Lily’s back where he holds her and he lets fly a desperate huff of laughter into the air beside Lily’s ear where he had moved to kiss her softly. “Holy fuck.”

“Almost two months, they said.” She swallows with difficulty as her throat tightens in an unbidden clench. “I’m going to keep it.”

James swallows and nods, stepping back to still hold her shoulders but meet her eyes with a wobbling smile and tears building at his lashes. “Okay.”

Lily feels her own eyes prickling then, the courage in James’ willingness to say  _ Okay _ to something so dire,  _ Okay _ to something unknown and terrifying, and of course he’s his father’s fucking son. She can’t help but nod as well and make herself forget, if only for a moment, that this reasonless twist of the present will rip its way into her life and pull it apart from the inside out. 

“We’ll do it, we can do it,” which comes out on a sob, and only because Lily hates the face she knows she makes when she cries she buries herself back into James’ shoulder. He clings to her, the single positive constant she has left, and muffles his own hiccup in Lily’s shoulder.

“I love you so much.”

It feels, in a way, like all the sordid randomness is trying to even out its own destruction with creation just as disastrous. Standing in the field with home waiting still a ways away, Lily hopes with a fling of her final scrap of faith up to those pinprick stars that it might be enough to drown out the leagues and leagues of loss behind her.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey folks, thanks for stopping by <3 I've been really stressed planning a big move and some other huge life changes--it's all for the better, but getting there is just a whole big Thing. This helped a lot to write, as my favorite angsty background music now has some plot to it in my head. Thanks again for reading, even when it's spurred little drabbles like this.


End file.
